the revelations of the keepsake box

As you may recall, I am getting ready to move. (Do you want to come sit on my couch in my apartment?)

The moving process involves plenty of packing, of course, but since most of my worldly possessions are contained in a 5 by 15 cell on Poplar Avenue -- not 201, thankfully -- I've turned my attention to the cleaning-out and getting-rid-of portion of our program. Quite aggressively.

(To be fair, "quite aggressively" is really the only way I've ever done it. For someone who has saved just about everything I ever breathed on as a child that I thought might mean something to me as an adult, I am oddly cutthroat about tossing things in the garbage when it comes time to trim the fat. TRIM IT! Trim it, I say.)

Underneath my bed at my parents' house, there were four separate keepsake boxes. FOUR. And there are a few more in the attic and at least one more in the closet, not to mention the keepsake box that's in storage. (I think there's only one in there.) After a particularly successful session last night, I consolidated the under-the-bed holdings into just one solitary box. It was a proud moment, y'all.

Some of the things I'd held onto in those boxes, you just would not believe. I have two words for you: Payne. Stewart. Yes. Payne Stewart. He made me love golf. Admittedly, it had a lot to do with his fashion choices, but we all come to the light in different ways, right? Inside my scrapbook, the scrapbook where I kept spelling bee certificates and citizenship awards and documentation of pretty much everything vaguely consequential that happened to me between the second grade and high school, was a two-page newspaper story about the death of Payne Stewart. TWO EFFING PAGES. I had carefully cut them out, trimmed around the edges, and taped them both into my scrapbook. Probably next to an honor society induction invitation.

Of course, beyond the downright absurd, I also found in this keepsake box (like every one I've ever had) pages and pages of writing. There was a three-ring binder from my high school creative writing class with dozens of free-writing prompt exercises, written in various sparkly colors of gel pen. There was my portfolio from three years on the high school newspaper staff, with literally every article I ever wrote for The Panther's Prey. And then there was a journal, a beautiful journal whose origin I would've forgotten altogether if it weren't for the inscription. It had been a gift from my third grade teacher. She gave it to me when I was 17, working for the local newspaper. I'd written a story about her, and she took me to lunch a few months later and gave me this journal.

I had written in it just a few times, but I could tell from the care I'd taken with my penmanship that I had intended for it to become a collection of sorts, something I would be proud or willing to show someone someday. Mostly, they were the random musings of a high school senior. But there was one entry that caught me. It was about music.

It was about the way I feel when I discover new music, the way my ears feel when they're swimming in new sounds. The way I feel when I walk into a record store. The way I feel when I create music. And then, very abruptly, I'd written: "Someone asked me today if I was passionate about journalism. I hesitated."

I went on to push at all the big questions: is this really what I want to be doing? Is what I've always planned for my life and my career the right thing for me? Do I love this or not? Does that matter?

It's such an odd thing, the time traveling that personal writing like this can allow you to do. Plenty of times in my 20s, after college, after grad school, I wondered those things. I wondered if this career that I'd always thought I wanted was really what I was meant to be doing. And ultimately I chose to leave it behind, when I had opportunities to keep working for daily or weekly newspapers and made the decision to pursue something different. I wouldn't say I'm one to second guess myself, but I am one to wonder.

As much as I love what I'm doing now, I still wonder. All the time.

But it seems like even then, I knew that this was where I was supposed to be. I threw a lot of things out of that keepsake box last night, but the journal is still there. I think it always will be.

cheers,

elizabeth

will you come to my apartment and sit on my couch?

It's true, y'all. I found an apartment. I'm moving in on March 1 to an eight-unit building at the corner of Poplar and Hawthorne, to a cozy one bedroom that actually has CEILING FANS.

It's the little things.

It has hardwood floors and a galley style kitchen and built in storage and a big bathroom and most importantly it is less than 10 minutes from my office and it will be filled with all my familiar things that I will jailbreak from the mini-storage and it is MINE. Mine, and only mine.

Signing the lease was a much more intimidating task than I had imagined it would be, because in some ways that signature was this silent vote of confidence in myself as a businesswoman. It said that I've figured this out well enough to take this step. That things are growing, and building in the right direction. That I'm ready to work just as hard as it takes to make sure they continue.

But ever since I did it, signed on the line and sealed the deal, I've been letting myself get more and more excited. And also ever since Saturday, I've been asking the Fair Haired Boy if he will come to my apartment and sit on my couch. In those exact words. Repeatedly.

So far, his answer is still yes. After two more weeks of what I predict will be continued inquiries on this topic, I hope that his answer will remain the same.

cheers,

elizabeth

about as wore out as a lady can get

Somehow we managed to raise more than $11,000 for Planned Parenthood this weekend. In related news: I'M EXHAUSTED.

But with the end of another year's V-Season, I am also back to the land of the living just a little bit. I'm getting caught up on a lot this week, and you can bet this blog is one of those things. Til then, here are a few photos of the big weekend.

Oh, and? The apartment hunt is over. More on that soon!

cheers,

elizabeth

that thing with the vag again

It all starts tonight, with The Memphis Monologues, and keeps going next week with Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues Feb. 9 - 11. You're saved from my nostalgic babbling this year about why I love this organization so much and how everyone who I've ever met is just so INSPIRATIONAL and also something about being humbled because good god damn, I have no effing time for anything.

Which is why you can look at these pretty faces below and click this link to order tickets. Y'all come see us now, you hear?

cheers,

elizabeth

the elusive one bedroom and a half-celebrity sighting

I have been apartment hunting since December. And if you count the three solid months before that, when I was "just keeping an eye on things," I've spent basically half of one year of my life refreshing Craiglist 27 times a day so that I could accidentally click on that same ad of that same apartment that is billed as a "fixer upper near Overton Park" but is actually a shack with exposed electrical wires in Binghampton.

Mostly my Craigslist-perusing and creeper drives down midtown streets have been met with disappointment -- out of my price range, too big, too small, too many sets of stairs to get to the front door. But there have been a handful that I've felt strongly enough about to take the next step: the viewing.

Two weeks ago, I thought I might have found The Place. It was in my price range, in a neighborhood I liked, and a decent square footage. After a solid week of e-mailing back and forth with the out-of-town owners to set something up with their in-town property manager, I nailed down a time to see it.

Y'all: I loved it. It was perfect. It was spacious, full of sunlight and had tons of built in storage. It had a little deck and new bathroom fixtures. And as I was waltzing from one room to the next, eyeballing the walls to start mapping out where all my frames would go and imagining furniture arrangements, I remembered something. I remembered that there had been another apartment listed in this same building. And I remembered that it was more expensive. And my stomach did a little flip flop. I knew. I knew before I even asked.

The woman who showed me the apartment was embarrassed and unsure if she'd taken me to the wrong unit, so she called the landlord in New York. Naturally, it was the more expensive apartment. Too expensive for my owning-my-own-business budget.

I felt like I was in an episode of Say Yes to the Dress and my consultant had accidentally let me try on a $10,000 dress when my budget was strictly $7,000 and now I was in love with it and who the hell was going to help me pay for it?

I had to take off the expensive dress, put it back on the rack and walk away. I did e-mail the landlord later to make an offer at a lower amount and he was very sweet when he shot me down, to his credit. But before I left the complex, I got to chatting with the gal who had showed me the place. She was very interested in what I did for a living and said she'd had a sister who was in the entertainment industry and that she also sang, but primarily on her church's worship team.

And then she tells me that her sister passed away very unexpectedly two years ago, and that she'd been very young. And I said how sorry I was to hear that, and how terrible it was. And then, just as nonchalantly as the conversation had started, she says: "Brittany Murphy?"

It's possible that I said, "Excuse me?"

Because y'all, this is real: I got showed an apartment by Brittany Murphy's half sister. And I wanted that place really badly and I was pretty broken hearted that I couldn't afford it, but DAMN. It's stories like these that make all the frustration worth it.

So, yes. I'll be refreshing Craigslist again tomorrow. But I'm one degree from the girl who once said: "What do you know Cher? You're just a VIRGIN who can't DRIVE."

cheers,

elizabeth